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Cyber Crime and Law In 1820, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, a textile manufacturer in France, produced the loom.
This device allowed the repetition of a series of steps in the weaving of special fabrics.
This resulted in a fear amongst Jacquard's employees that their traditional employment

Notes and livelihood were being threatened. They committed acts of sabotage ego discourage
Jacquard from further use of the new technology. This is the first recorded cyber crime.
Today computers have come a long way, with neural networks and Nano-computing
promising to turn every atom in a glass of water into a computer capable of performing
a Billion operations per second. Cyber crime is an evil having its origin in the growing

dependence on computers in modern life. In a day and age when everything from
microwave ovens and refrigerators to nuclear power plants is being run on computers,
cybercrime has assumed rather sinister implications. Major Cybercrimes in the recent
past include the Citibank rip off. US $ 10 million were fraudulently transferred out
of the bank and into a bank account in Switzerland. A Russian hacker group led by
Vladimir Kevin, a renowned hacker, perpetrated the attack. The group compromised
the bank's security systems. Vladimir was allegedly using his office computer at AO

Saturn, a computer firm in St. Petersburg, Russia, to break into Citibank computers. He
was finally arrested on Heathrow airport on his way to Switzerland.

1.8 Defining Cyber Crime

At the onset, let us satisfactorily define “cybercrime” and differentiate it from
“conventional Crime”. Computer crime can involve criminal activities that are traditional
in nature, such as theft, fraud, forgery, defamation and mischief, all of which are subject
to the Indian Penal Code. The abuse of computers has also given birth to a gamut of
new age crimes that are addressed by the Information Technology Act, 2000.
Defining cybercrimes, as “acts that are punishable by the Information Technology

Act” would be unsuitable as the Indian Penal Code also covers many cybercrimes, such
as email spoofing and cyber defamation, sending threatening emails etc. A simple yet
sturdy definition of cybercrime would be “unlawful acts wherein the computer is either
a tool or a target or both”.
Let us examine the acts wherein the computer is a tool for an unlawful act. This kind
of activity usually involves a modification of a conventional crime by using computers.
Some examples are:

Financial crimes: This would include cheating, credit card frauds, money
laundering etc. To cite a recent case, a website offered to sell Alphonso mangoes at
a throwaway price. Distrusting such a transaction, very few people responded to or
supplied the website with their credit card numbers. These people were actually sent the

Alphonso mangoes. The word about this website now spread like wildfire. Thousands

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